Geoffrey Chaucer, an Englishman who lived from about 1343 to 1400, worked mainly as a royal bureaucrat. No records document him receiving any payment or favors specifically for his poetry. As a member of the gentry participating on the margins of the English royal court, Chaucer appears to have written mainly for women. Irony, gynocentrism, and misandry are prominent features of his work. If you hate reading Chaucer, you understanding him well. He has ironically come to be known as the Father of English literature.
Richard of Venosa’s De Paulino et Polla depicts an old man’s sexual infirmity. It’s relevant to Oswald the Reeve’s Prologue in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. … Read the post De Paulino et Polla: context for Chaucer’s Reeve’s Prologue
Within the extensive intertexuality and dialog of Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, the Latin comedy Lidia provides the implicit voice for its marriage encomium. … Read the post marriage encomium in dialog with Lidia in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale
The myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, first written in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, developed to be acutely gender-polarized in Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women. … Read the post Pyramus & Thisbe from Ovid’s gender subtlety to polarized Chaucer
Across 1700 years of the Aeneid’s literary reception, Virgil’s Dido has been gender-misinterpreted as love’s martyr and Aeneas as her seducer and betrayer. … Read the post martyr of love Dido suffered suicide & abortion of fetus with Aeneas
In Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, Alisoun cuckolded John, who later suffered a concussion and broken arm. Absolon rammed a hot plow blade into Nicholas’s ass. … Read the post Chaucer, Miller’s Tale: ass-reaming theme of man’s inhumanity to man